TUTORIAL: Using Blender 2.9+ for CAS Projects

Usage Guide

Viewport
Each template opens to a large viewport focused on the main nude body, each with a soft pastel colour on their material to easily set them apart from your meshes and Blender’s interface without being hard on the eyes.

I have highlighted the areas and buttons that you will work with the most.

For most projects, you can start here and use the body as a reference for the location and scale of your mesh. All conversions will involve editing your mesh to fit this body.

If you are using a laptop without a mouse, head to Edit > Preferences > Input to enable Emulate 3 Button Mouse for the MMB controls.
I highly recommend investing even in the cheapest external mouse available if you are going to be using Blender a lot!

Save As
Utilise Save As to leave the original template unmodified.
That way, you can make all kinds of changes to the contents and have a fresh template to use on each new project.

If you ever accidentally save over the original, you can always redownload it.

Scene Collection
There are two folders in the Scene Collection.
BASE contains the visible body mesh, a hidden variant in a full body outfit, and a hidden rig.
‘Project’ is empty, it’s there for your meshes if you wish.

Whichever folder is selected (including Scene Collection itself) is where a newly imported mesh will go, so if you don’t see your mesh in the list make sure to check collapsed folders.

Full Body Outfit
A variant with a basic set of clothes is included with both templates. Hide _BODY and unhide _CLOTHED to use this reference instead.

This is primarily useful if you’re making hair.

Clipping with clothes will be unavoidable, but can be reduced by leaving some space between the hair and the skin- and accounting for common mesh pieces like the collars of shirts.

Making Clothes
If you’re a 3D artist, beginner or advanced, who wants to make Sims clothing from scratch, you can start modelling directly on the BODY mesh according to whichever workflow you prefer.

This could be utilising the original geometry to extrude new form-fitting parts, duplicating and solidifying, or retopologizing a new shape entirely.

When you’re done, you can select and delete the unnecessary parts.

Including Body Parts
If you’ve worked with Sims clothing before, you’ll know that the arms , legs, neck, and such are part of the clothing mesh.

If you make a new mesh or convert one, you’ll need to include the visible parts and delete the obscured ones.

Select the parts you need from the BODY mesh and Separate them, then Join them to your new mesh.

The BODY mesh has all of its bone weights fully intact. You can keep perfect assignments in locations that copy imperfectly from reference, like fingers and the inner leg, if you export as .geom.

Morphs
I’ve added the body morphs to the template, for reference purposes to aid the creation of manual morphs in Blender..

In the Object Properties tab, the BODY mesh has all four morphs set in the Shape Keys dropdown.

Make sure you’re in Object Mode to click and drag the Value slider to 1.0.

More than one morph may be applied at a time. In-game, the Fat and Thin slider are each end of the same slider- so only one should be used.

Testing Bones with Poses
To preview bone weights without being in-game, all of the body meshes are rigged and have a Pose preset.

To use, add an Armature modifier to your mesh and set the Object to the auRig.

Select the _rig and navigate to Object Data- the icon will be a green stick figure. It does not need to be unhidden.

Switch to Pose Position. Both the body mesh and your mesh (if it has the appropriate bone weights) will pose.

The female template also includes a ‘pose’ that mimics the in-game breast slider, which is a bone scale rather than a morph, for previewing the effect on long hairs.

Select the BreastSlider in the Pose Library, then the magnifying glass icon to Apply Pose Library Pose. To reset, select BoneTest and the magnifying glass icon again.

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